Wellbeing

Playwright Annie Siddons moved out of London to ‘settle down’ and discovered it made her feel cripplingly isolated. One divorce later, she’s sharing her experiences in a play about loneliness

Chronic loneliness crept up on Annie Siddons the way chronic loneliness tends to: by stealth, over time. She was a busy playwright and performer who had recently crested into her 40s, and she lived and worked in her beloved inner London. “My city,” she has a tendency of saying, theatrical hand to beating heart. But then, with her (now former) husband and two young daughters, she moved to the suburbs to settle down. To Twickenham, specifically, the home of British rugby, and far too far from the centre of town – approximately 12 miles – for the tube line to stretch. Twelve miles is hardly very far at all, of course, but a Rubicon had nevertheless been crossed. She was a suburbanite now, and cast adrift from her former life, her former friends and sense of self.

“The London Borough of Richmond [to which Twickenham belongs] is the most married place in the UK,” she tells me, making her eyes wide to convey the sheer terror of the statistic. “Everyone is straight, everyone in the same bog standard marriage. Nobody between the ages of 20 and 30 lives there; the slang that people are using in Hackney won’t reach us for 15 years. It’s all so homogenous, so white. Where are the Jews? the black people? There are only a few peripheral Asians…”

Sipping from a double macchiato in a busy West London café, her curly brown hair falls over the straps of her sparkly silver leotard. The 45-year-old shudders with all the drama of her professional calling. “I just didn’t recognise it as part of my city, the city I love. And I didn’t like it.”

Nicki Hobday in ‘How (Not) to Live in Suburbia’ (Photo: Garry Cook)

I’m the Walrus of Loneliness. Let me in

Siddons endured several years, but the loneliness only deepened. Over time, she divorced her husband and became habituated to single motherhood, though she remained in Twickenham because her daughters were perfectly happy growing up in Zone 5. In time, she sought therapy, and then decided to write a play about her condition, How (Not) to Live in Suburbia, in the hope the process might help make her better. After a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival last year, it returns to London this month. It’s a smart, funny play in which she presents loneliness in physical form, a lumbering walrus that shadows her every move and which she desperately tries to shake off.

“Who the fuck are you?” she asks it on first sight.

“I’m the Walrus of Loneliness. Let me in,” comes the reply.

Writing it proved difficult, she admits. “I worked so hard to make it the right measure of raw and honest, funny and entertaining. I didn’t just want to rub my besmirched underwear in everyone’s faces, now did I?”

Many people, however, might think she did just that. Loneliness is a difficult subject to broach, either to oneself or in company. It’s the “silent epidemic”, because, really, how many of us are prepared to admit to having too few friends, and wishing, out loud, we had more company, better company? It is little understood, a taboo subject. But there are signs that it is now, at last, about to be properly tackled.

Before her senseless murder last year, the Labour MP Jo Cox set up a commission to highlight what she saw as an all-too-common human ailment, and to start a national conversation about its scale and impact. Since her death, it has become a cross-party initiative. Siddons says there is much work to be done. “Because of the fuckery of NHS funding right now, there still isn’t enough help being offered by our GPs, our hospitals. There is no proper infrastructure. That needs to change.”

In trying to help herself, Siddons did a lot of reading on the neuroscience behind loneliness, how it is not to be confused with mental health issues like depression, but how the two can often co-exist, feeding into, and off, one another.

“Loneliness is about the gap between your connection needs and the amount of connection you are getting,” she says. “So, someone might be socially isolated but have a rich interior life, while other people, who might have a lot of friends, still don’t get the connections they need. Me, I’m a gregarious person. I love people, I’m hospitable. I have pretty good social skills, I can make eye contact, and smile. I’ve got a sense of humour, I’m tactile. Lots of advantages, then, you’d think might prevent loneliness, but I just wasn’t getting the connections I needed. And, stranded in Twickenham, I became crippled by it.”

Yummy mummies and Stepford wives

Like many of us, she is perhaps slightly guilty of stereotyping here. The suburbia she depicts is a neighbourhood teeming with Stepford wives; all blonde, all super-fit. They are all seen pushing designer pushchairs nestling small children who will one day grow up into homogenous middle management types. Surely, I say, she’d have been just as prone to loneliness if she had lived in, say, Dalston?

She smiles. “Okay, I’m a bit of a romantic about working-class and immigrant communities, perhaps,” – a Londoner, Siddons is of Greek extraction – “but I do think there is something sterile and terrifying about the middle-class nuclear family as a social structure. I just don’t think it works.”

As a consequence of writing a play that deals with people’s darkest insecurities, she has become something of an inspiration. It remains an edgy subject for many – those of her friends who have seen the play have found it difficult to look her in the eye afterwards – but fellow sufferers flock to her. In Annie Siddons, they have found their soulmate.

“I have to remind people that I’m not offering an evening of free therapy here; I’m just offering up a play,” she says, “but I suppose it validates their own experiences, and makes them feel less alone. And that’s good. One way of helping to eradicate loneliness is by increasing our social connections. But there need to be more ways. We need to have a return to a greater sense of community in our cities – multi-cultural, socially diverse – because if we’re not careful, in this modern world of ours, we’ll lose that altogether. And what then?”

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